Category: Advertising

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As the end of the year approaches, Google and Facebook advertising solution are seeing harmony that has never been reached before to an extend that makes one asks, are they teaming up or at least having a common vision for 2015?

Facebook has announced their new secret weapon and it has been a major game changer in 2014, Kenshoo recently did a study and found that combining search and facebook resulted in 30% increase in return on adspend. Facebook wants to capitalise and build upon the success and investment that advertisers are doing in Google search campaigns.

Search is always a great way to start a digital campaign. It helps the business owners find out how people are searching for their business and what their needs are. Remarketing through Google display network has always been a very important companion to a successful search campaign as it helps increasing the ROI and dropping the cost per acquisition.

Facebook uses the audience that is acquired through Google search as a building block, through their website custom audiences feature they have the ability to find existing customers and target them with a special message. This is a valuable feature as it helps further increase ROI and reduce CPA. Facebook can reach over 50% of the users driven by Google through their tracking pixel.

Let’s face it, driving user registration to SMB websites is not an easy job, building Google / FB audience are more feasible and cost effective alternatives for marketers. Ultimately, growing these lists could be done through using look alike audience feature that both platforms provide.

Here is an infographic that i created to show the level of connection today between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Except to see better harmony in 2015.

Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, despite recent growth by services such as Pinterest and Instagram, Facebook remains the dominant social networking platform.

Facebook advertising is no longer what it used to be over the past few years, they used to preach two things which are not valid anymore:

1. Setup a page, Identify your audience, create compelling content, Advertise, and finally measure & adjust. [WRONG] Today, we all know that investing time, money and effort on a Facebook page is not worthwhile because of very limited organic reach of your posts, it’s basically an investment into something that you do not own and have no control over.

2. Facebook advertising core value proposition is about word of the mouth advertising. [WRONG] As the product is evolving there are no longer what used to be called sponsored stories, driving post engagements and page likes are not as attractive as before.

This is what Facebook is not about anymore, so what is it about?

Facebook is the only network that gives advertisers the ability to use lookalike audiences that are based on social graph dataincluding demographic, psychographic, transaction level attributes. To create a lookalike audience, FB creates some kind of regression equation from original custom audience data with these attributes as predictive variables. Then it matches top 1% of FB users that have similar attributes and creates the lookalike audiences.

Google Display Network already has this feature but it uses cookie-based behavioural targeting and twitter rolled out a similar feature last September but it is still in early stages to judge.

Lookalike audiences works extremely well and saves you the hassle of having to assume what kind of targeting would work better for your campaign. However, it is as good as the initial audience seed that you provide, it has to be very clean and well segmented in order to send the right signals to the Facebook algorithm and let the magic work.

There are multiple ways to create the seed such as using the conversion tracking pixel or choosing segments from fans of your page. However, I recommend to use custom audiences by uploading a list of emails of the registered users on your site. For the best results you can follow these steps:

1. Generate a list of registered users on your site.

2. Segment the list to groups, each group has a maximum of 10,000 emails(that the maximum allowed list size). You can segment your lists according to data that you record in your site such as the engagement levels of users (e.g. Users who write reviews and rating regularly), purchase activities, frequency of login, demographics, etc, …

3. For each segment, create a custom audience list, FB will match the emails to FB accounts (you should expect a match rate of 50%, for example if you provide 10K emails, Facebook should be able to find at least 5K emails of them registered)

4. Create lookalike audience for each custom audience list, make sure to choose the best precision option and the location, this should get you around 250K lookalike audiences for every list uploaded that contains about 5K valid emails on FB.

5. Create ads relevant to each lookalike audience segment.

You will be amazed how this feature works well, but it all depends on how good your seed data is prepared and segmented.

Note: Just to make sure how accurate FB algorithm works, try to create an ad for one of the custom audiences and check for its metrics such as male vs female or iOS users vs Android users. Try the same for lookalike audiences and you will be amazed by how similar the ratios are!

Do you see this as an approach that will help you reach your goals and objectives? Math and science says it should as well as testimonials by advertisers who have tried this so far.

Yellow Pages has launched 3 new apps aiming at making its service easier to use and accessible to a wide range of users in Egypt.

First up, there is a new Yellow Pages iPhone app available on App Store. The app is more than just a re-skin that is iOS 7 compatible, the app user experience is designed to help the users find what they are looking for on the go through a smart single search box where you don’t need to type the location and the app is smart enough to detect your location and show the results near you.

The app is practically a directory and a map with over 330,000 business listings and venues in Egypt that users can carry in their pockets. Taping on one of the home category icons will effectively help the users discover and explore local stores and venues near them. This is good news for businesses that want to acquire more customers from their neighbourhood, or passing by customers that happens to be in this location at that specific time and need to buy a product or a quick access to a service.

4 new updates have been released to the app in the past 2 months, each single update of them received a stunningly 5 stars rating from the users. The old English and Arabic apps are now merged into a single universal app in which users can switch between the 2 languages; much better for the user experience.

Android users now finally can download the long-awaited Yellow Pages Android app on Google Play store. The app is accessible to over 3,835 Android devices worldwide. The app is optimised for high end Android devices such as Samsung S4 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 but it also works well with low end Android handsets such as the Galaxy Ace and Duos, also works great with 7 and 10 inch tablets.

Integration is done nicely with Google maps, which makes it very easy for the users to use turn-by-turn voice navigation available in Egypt through Google Maps. The Android app has received very positive feedback from the users, over 680 users rated the app and over 82% of them rated 4 or 5 starts for it. Exceptional for an Android app to satisfy equally for both high and low end device owners.

Windows 8 is often criticised for its shallow apps catalog, Egypt is no exception, but this is changing overtime with more apps being launched and push by Microsoft and its partner Linkdotnet in Egypt. Egypt Yellow Pages Windows 8.1 app is available for download on the Windows Store as one of the leading apps in the the Egyptian market, only a few apps came before like EgyptAir Windows App and Egyptian eGovernment maps app which is also powered by Yellow Pages data.

The new apps have received hundreds of thousands of downloads and continue to grow rapidly. Yellow Media has announced its intent to launch a new context-based relevant in stream mobile ads as an innovative way of mobile advertising that has a positive value on the user experience based on their interests rather than traditional mobile banner advertising.

Check out my latest article at Wamda: Egypt aims to boost investment in the ICT sector to 55 billion EGP.

To do so, the Ministry of ICT mostly plans to invest in infrastructure, granting 75% of Egyptian households access to internet at a speed of 2Mbps by 2015, and, by 2021, increasing access to 90% of households at 25 Mbps. It also hopes to offer 3G service to 98% of users by 2015, and 4G service for 90% of the population by 2021.

Google have officially launched Google AdWords Premier SMB Parntner Program Page in Egypt. It is the first Arabic page that is launched under that section as Egypt Yellow Pages is officially the first partner in Egypt and the Arab world (After Morocco whcih launched their site in French).